Morocco minibus ravine accident claims 24 lives after driver lost control

Local officials revealed Sunday that as many as 24 people were killed after a minibus carrying market-goers in Morocco plunged into a ravine marking one of the North African country's horrific road accidents.

The minibus carrying passengers in Demnate, Azilal, flipped on a bend while travelling along a steep route to a weekly market. Images in the local media showed the car crushed at the bottom of the ravine.

The Demnate Hospital's director, Youssef Makhloufi, confirmed that "all the passengers are dead," and included at least two women and a child.

Local officials have started an investigation into the terrible catastrophe, despite the fact that accidents happen frequently on the highways of Morocco and other North African nations, where thousands of people die in traffic accidents every year.

Previously, in March, a minibus carrying 11 people, largely agricultural labourers, crashed into a tree in the remote village of Brachoua after the driver lost control, according to local authorities at the time.

According to AFP, many poorer citizens use coaches and minibuses to travel in rural areas.

In August last year, 23 people were killed and 36 injured when their bus overturned on a bend east of Morocco's economic capital Casablanca.

An average of 3,500 road deaths and 12,000 injuries are recorded annually in Morocco, according to the National Road Safety Agency, with an average of 10 deaths per day. The figure last year was around 3,200.

Authorities have set out to halve the mortality rate by 2026 ever since the worst bus accident in the country's history left 42 dead in 2012.

In neighbouring Algeria, 34 people were killed on July 19 when a passenger bus collided head-on with a pickup truck carrying fuel cans and burst into flames, deep in the southern Sahara region, officials said.

Algeria's deadliest road crash in years also left 12 others injured, many with severe burns, Algeria's civil defence agency said.

One of Tunisia's worst road accidents occurred in 2019 when a bus plunged into a ravine, killing at least 24 Tunisians and injuring 18 others.

Libya's roads have ranked among the deadliest in the world with the Libyan interior ministry's traffic department recording 4,115 road accidents across the country in 2018, with 2,500 people killed and more than 3,000 others injured.

About 7,000 people lost their lives on the roads of Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, in 2020, according to official figures.